Firefox Tweaking Tips - Easier Access to "Page Info / Media"

I recently learned that there are two ways to make it easier to access the "Page Info" window in Firefox:

In short:

1) The "Ctrl-i" shortcut opens it directly

 

2)  Enable the following option:  "browser.menu.showViewImageInfo".   Then, right-clicking on any images will now include a menu entry to directly jump to the "Page Info window's "Media" tab", with the relevant image selected

Apparently the following Bugzilla issue was tracked this through to completion (whereas the linked issue to put back easier access to this in a few extra places is still a pending todo even today, YEARS after the easy access functionality was removed!)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1692553

Photo Organisation Scheme

Someone recently asked me how I currently structure my photo collection. 

 

The short answer - It's a mix of:

* "Structured" stuff for my "proper camera" stuff from 2010 onwards, 

* A similar system for camera photos too this past year and a bit, alongside / integrated

* Haphazard per-device collections for the rest

While I should try to improve this, I have also been burned before, having lost a good few months of stuff (suspected) from one old camera from a botched reorder that I then backed out from...

Windows Terminal Tip - New Tab Behaviour

Saving this here to save me another mad search again next time:

 

If using "Windows Terminal", to make the "New Tab" behaviour sane, go into each relevant profile, and change the "Starting Directory" setting to "./"  (i.e. current directory that the active tab is using)

 

Notes: 

* This makes the behaviour match watch every other OS does, and what you'd naturally expect, when trying to fork up another terminal tab to work on a sub-task from the same deeply nested folder

* The stupid default value here defaults to "%USERPROFILE%, which is akin to opening a new window from the start menu, located miles away from where the files you want to work on here and now live!

[Firefox Tip] Useful Shortcut for Checking on What's Going Bad (Memory / CPU Usage)

Just learned of a useful tip for current versions of Firefox to bring up the "about:processes" page (that shows memory + CPU usage of various pages + extensions)

It turns out you can use the "Shift-Esc" hotkey to quickly activate it 

Noting this here so I can find it more easily for myself in the future

Thanks @carey@mastodon.nz for the tip!

Tip: Getting Threaded Conversations Working Consistently Across Your Desktop Outlook Mailbox

Here are some notes on how I've got Outlook set up to make my work mailbox a bit more manageable. Most of these things are probably officially documented "somewhere", but it's nice having a quick guide for getting a setup that seems more sane (for anyone coming from Gmail)

 

This post comes about because, while I had this working in my Inbox, I found that this was not the case for my other folders once I moved threads there. Hence my search for answers. 

Short Instructions  - For Enabling Threading on "Other" Folders (see image above):

1) Go to one of the affected folders
2) Go to "View" tab on Ribbon
3) Enable "Show as Conversations"
4) In the confirmation prompt, click "All Folders" (vs just "This Folder")

I suspect I'll have to go in and redo this for any new folders I add at some point in the future. But at least this gets all the current ones working nicely.

Bonus Tip:  Fixing the need to triple-click on the annoying little triangles to collapse threads

Make sure you've got that "Always Expand Selected Conversations" thing from that menu selected, which fixes that problem (it seems).

Oh, and you need to do that per-folder... unfortunately, this case doesn't show the handy "change for all folders" popup.

Struggles of a Rust Novice - Annoyances and Stumbling Blocks

Over the past few weekends, I've been spending time investigating more of the Rust language. Along with the web trifecta (HTML, CSS, JS) and OpenFrameworks, this is one of the things I've been meaning to spend some time learning/playing with this year.

It's a funny kind of language, as I've previous noted during my very brief foray into some simple things from last year) - On one hand, a lot of the concepts seem nice/vaguely familiar to stuff I've played with in other languages, making it sometimes feel deceptively easy to use. But then, you go to compile the code, and proceed to spend the next 30-60 minutes trying to find a way to convert various things into the right types that the compiler insists you need. Admittedly, it's quite frustrating work at times (see notes on String handling below), but, it pales in comparison to the blackhole and deranged hell that is web-based dev (i.e. CSS-based Layouts in particular - aaaaaaargh!!! Despite now having "CSS Flow" and "CSS Grid", it seems that CSS Layouts and I still don't get along very much at all). Faced with a choice between the two (and having just done experienced both back-to-back recently), I'd much rather face the Rust compiler anyday.

Anyway, to actually get a proper feel for the language this time, I decided to use this opportunity to bash together a little processing tool that I was going to need for another one of the many projects I'm working on atm:

That is, a tool to take XSPF playlists generated by VLC (and containing a carefully sequenced list of music I've composed/recorded over the past year), extract the filenames (and process them to unpack/extract-out the important identifying bits of metadata I was embedding in the filenames), and then spit all this info out into a more easily consumable format (e.g. JSON).  

Sure, I could've done this all in Python (though it lacks a XML library that just gives me the DOM element tree with no "namespace" tag mangling, etc.), or a mix of VLC + Python (i.e. saving out a m3u list - 1 line per track - then processing that in Python), but this way was going to be more fun (and a good way to throw something a bit meatier/realistic at Rust than the toy-examples I'd been playing with) :)


Hopefully the following post will be enlightening to some people out there - both other newbies stuck and struggling to get their heads around certain things they keep running into, but also for the Rust dev team in their self-professed "ergonomics drive" to lessen the humps that new devs face when learning Rust.

QML Tip: Making one ShaderEffect use the output of another ShaderEffect

I've been doing quite a lot of work in QML lately for one of my research projects. Recently, I ran into some problems when trying to use ShaderEffects to actually apply them to "interesting" widgets/elements (i.e. on to anything that's not an Image and/or is more complicated than just a simple Rectangle). This post is just a quick guide to some of the key issues here (and ways around them), since it's not exactly that obvious from the documentation that this is the cause/solution, and no other hits come up about these issues...

Useful Tip: Changing command line prompt on Windows

I just came across a useful little trick this afternoon for making the Windows command line prompt (i.e. the one you get when running cmd, which shows the current directory) much shorter  (heck, you can set it to anything you like even!), so I thought I'd just note it here so that I can look it up again should I forget in future.

prompt [new_prompt_goes_here]

That's it! Just type this little command, and it will change the prompt that gets displayed.

Incomplete List of Things to Try for Troubleshooting Blender Cloth/Sims

I was fielding some questions about debugging problems where a cloth sim was passing through an animated character mesh this afternoon. So, I thought I'd just include a list of the common things to check on when a Blender Cloth or Physics sim doesn't collide correctly.

Disclaimer: I'm by no means an expert or too experienced with the particulars of the Blender cloth sim. However, I have played around with these enough and/or come across enough bug reports on this stuff to have a few ideas about common issues that can occur. Hopefully this will be of some use to someone out there :)

Anim Tip: Pose Libraries are just Actions!

From time to time, I hear questions about people wanting relink Pose Libraries, or manually reorder the poses, and not knowing how/what to do. The answers to these questions are quite simple once you know one simple trick about Pose Libraries:

Pose Libraries are just Actions!  (*)

(*) The fine print:
- The pose data is just stored as keyframes in these Actions
- The "secret sauce" is that Pose Library actions use markers (stored inside the action) to tell Blender which frame each "pose" is stored on. The name of each marker is the name of the pose. These markers are drawn as the taller, "bone" shaped markers.
- If you're going to do anything to these Actions, make sure you keep the markers and keyframes in sync!

Blender Animation FAQ's - June 2015 Edition

From time to time, several issues commonly popup up time and time again. So, I'll try to answer a few of these that come to mind most currently.

A few tips for working with Word 2013

Over the past few weeks, I've been bunkering down to write up a big chunk of work I've been doing for my thesis studies. To make it a bit easier for dealing with some of the journals that this will eventually get published in, I've been doing this work in Word again, having previous stuck to Latex for 3-4 years (with brief stints with LibreOffice).

While I do still prefer to do large docs in Latex (large docs being more manageable when you can just split them up into a collection of small files which can be accessed quite easily, not to mention the nicer reference management, and safe in the knowledge that your images won't disappear or become randomly detached from their captions after a single keypress), and waver between liking LibreOffice and then dropping it again a few weeks later after running into yet more clunkiness/incompatibilities,  it has to be said that there are some nice things about Word.

This post will cover a few things that you may/may not know about working with Word. Some of these I only really figured out recently, and found that they do improve things quite a bit.

Blender Dev Tip: Modal Keymaps for Select Circle

Doh! The answer in retrospect seems so simple (and it was, if I'd remembered this quirk from the last time I'd encountered it several years ago), but you'd be stuck if you didn't know where to look...

For a bit of a fun break from the work I've been doing recently for my research work, I've been hacking some new features for Blender. However, this evening, I ended up wasting quite a bit of time trying to figure out why the circle-select operator I'd been working on was not working. Namely, it wasn't responding to any events once activated.

Long story short: If you're coding a "Select Circle" operator, you need to add the following line at the end of gesture_circle_modal_keymap() in wm_operators.c:

WM_modalkeymap_assign("<your_operator_id_name_here>");

This basically says that the modal keymap needed by these operator should be used when doling out events to your operator. Otherwise, the events simply won't get passed down, and you'll be left wondering why it's not working...

[Second Attempt] Getting Ralink RT3290 Wifi working on Linux Mint 15 (and HP Envy 17)

Last year, I posted a short tutorial about a failed attempt at getting a stable wifi connection on HP Envy 17 under Linux (Mint 15) with the crappy Ralink RT3290 card it uses. Initially, things looked promising with that fix... that is, until I was about 90% complete writing that article, and the whole machine locked up, in what I soon came to learn was known as a "kernel panic".

Yesterday, in preparation for a potential repartitioning attempt sometime "soon" to resolve some upcoming disk-space availability issues (i.e. I initially set aside > 500GB of my disk for Linux, but since I'm not using it that much now, the measly 200 GB for Windows is almost exhausted now), I finally got around to uploading to Github the sources for the patched driver I've had running on Linux since my last post.



Quick Links + Instructions
* The sources can be downloaded from:
 https://github.com/Aligorith/ralink3209_drivers/tree/x64_PanicFixesPorted
(NOTE: To be clear, you need to be on the "x64_PanicFixesPorted" branch, NOT the master)

* IIRC, you should be able to just compile that straight (without any further tweaks), and then install it as per the instructions in my previous tutorial.

Canon 7D Tricks I just learned of...

After close to four years of using my Canon 7D (I got it in early September 2010, about 1-2 days before the first quake - I still hadn't properly unboxed my macro lens when the 7.1 struck, which sent that lens-still-securely-boxed-up flying into the trash can into a soft bed of crumpled tissues), today I suddenly came across some features I hadn't known existed. One thing led to another, and now I've just picked up a bunch of new features which look interesting enough that I'll need to spend some time playing with them for sure...

Windows Tip: Adding an item to the context menu for a particular filetype

This afternoon, I set up Qt5 (or rather, PyQt5) with the Python 3 interpreter so that I could have a play around with the new stuff (e.g. integrated widgets, etc.) in QML/QtQuick 2 (which ships with Qt5). By and large though, I still want to use Python 2 for the bulk of my work for the time being, so that got me thinking about adding context menu item to all the Python files so that would run these using the newer interpreted instead.

Here's what you need to do on Windows 8 to do this:
1) Start: regedit

2) Navigate to:  HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Python.File\shell

3) Right-click on shell -> New Key. Call this something like "Run with Python3" (or whatever you want that command to be called in the menu

4) Right-click on the folder/key created in step 3 -> New Key. Call this "command"

5) Double-click on the "(Default)" entry under command. Enter the command to run the Python interpreter as the new value for this entry

6) Repeat the process for HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Python.NoConFile\shell 
     (NOTE: this step only applies when dealing with Python files. If you're doing this procedure on some other file type, replace all the "Python.blah" bits with the relevant types for the filetype you've got)


I'm just writing this down here so that I know where to look next time I need to do this :)

FAQ/Rant: Learning your way around a new codebase

From time to time, we get emails and forum postings asking about how to get started developing Blender. These almost always follow a similar predictable pattern (no offense to any individuals whose posts actually resembled this almost to the letter):

1) Blender is cool. I want to write some cool new big feature (*A) or fix some bugs (*B).
2) I've experience in C/C++/Python/Java/OpenGL and/or have taken classes in C/C++/OpenGL/matrix math (*D)
3) I'm trying to understand Blender's source code. The source code is so large that I don't know where to start (*A+E) / the "learning curve is too steep" (*A+D+E) / I tried stepping through the code in a debugger and it's too complex/hard to follow (*D+F) / it's weird/confusing (*D+F+G)
4) HEELLLLPPP MEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  PLZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Link Dump - Some common and interesting questions answered

From time to time, some links will come up regarding some interesting questions which you may have always wondered about. Here is a collection of such links I collected a few months back. Enjoy!

Obscure Quirks in Blender's Data Model - Geometry FAQ

In the past few months, there have been a number of instances where people have been stumbling across several obscure parts [1, 2, 3] of Blender's geometry data management design. While these are not exactly new quirks (indeed, most of these are ancient and predate the open source era), they certainly will catch people off guard. For instance, when I first came across some of these while coding the Mask Modifier and Shape Keys remapper, I was quite surprised about the nature of these things.

Quick Tip - Filter by Name in Animation Editors

Just a quick tip about the animation editor filtering options which you may/may not be aware of, but which came up in #blendercoders this evening.

(I can't remember whether I've documented this before, so I might as well do so now; repeating this for anyone who may have missed it the first time may do some good anyway)